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That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa.
by MojoLobo 6y ago
That would explain why there are dense clusters of satellites over middle-of-nowhere oceans, but they're sparse over continents, particularly Asia and Africa.
They're probably going after a different market?
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThe satellites orbit the earth every 1.6 hours. They're not in geo-stationary orbit, they're in very low earth orbit to reduce latency. And any orbit will spend a significant portion of it's time over water. Also, only the green circled satellites are in their final orbit, the yellow circled ones were recently launched and are not yet at their final altitude and position. It takes a couple of months for orbit raising.
- MojoLobo 6y agoAh, thanks for clarifying. I just assumed for some reason they were geostationary satellites.
- makomk 6y agoYeah, as I understand it the current generation of Starlink satellites are likely to be pretty much unusable when they're over the ocean since they need to have line of sight to a ground station.
- aeyes 6y agoThey might be usable for airplanes, ships, oil platforms, islands...
- zaphoyd 6y agowithout interlinks an airplane, ship, oil platform, or island could talk to the starlink sat, but the sat couldn't talk to its ground base station to forward their messages to the rest of the internet. Coverage for deep ocean will require a second generation that can talk sat -> sat.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThere are remote islands with enough fiber to support a ground station. Not a lot, but they exist.
- shaklee3 6y agoSource? Which islands?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sacred_numbers 6y agoA ground station doesn't have to actually be on the ground. They could park a boat in the ocean between London and NYC with equipment to act as a repeater. This YouTube video (along with others on this channel) does a good job of explaining how this could work. [https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY]
- kanox 6y ago> They could park a boat in the ocean between London and NYC with equipment to act as a repeater. They could, but I bet they won't. Speculation is fun but permanent floating platforms are expensive, it's easier to just wait until inter-satellite links.